When I was younger, I used to, almost literally, devour books. I was an avid enough reader, especially of fantasy and science fiction, that I routinely read while walking from place to place, during church services, and so forth. That changed a fair deal when I was able to afford my first computer, and my more obsessive qualities transferred to that medium, but I still read with great regularity. In recent years, though, I have definitely lost the drive to read... there are too many games, cartoons, movies, etc. to take up large chunks of time. The most "reading" I've done of late has been manga, usually in snippets here and there, occasionally getting sucked into a volume long enough to finish it at one reading... and even then, that takes about an hour, tops.
Over the weekend, Borders held a sale on their Kobo e-reader, bringing the price down to about $100 from its regular $140, which was enough to trigger some thought on my part... what kept me from reading at home? Paperbacks of the sort I tend to like have a fair degree of heft to them, and, while bookmarkable, require some manipulation to get back to where you left off... and, if you have a short reading window, remembering exactly where you left off in a couple of pages of text can take a bit as well. An e-reader takes care of most of those issues for you, plus you don't accumulate physical books all over the house... and the Kobo is a bare-bones device (which warms my engineer heart), supports standard publishing formats (so you're not locked into one store's goods), and comes pre-loaded with 100 books.
So, yeah, I bit... and so far, I'm not sad I did. Those pre-loaded books are "classics", of course, which works for me. I tried out the intended store mechanism to download another free book, which was straightforward enough... but, especially at first, I'm likely to take full advantage of some of the legal, free sources for books online. For example, Project Gutenberg, for some older titles like The Devil's Dictionary... or the Baen Free Library, when I'm looking for a new sci-fi series to get lured into. It may take me a bit longer to get through some of these titles than when I was younger, but even 5 or 10 minutes at a shot should get me some good entertainment value for the money.
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